6 August, 2425
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Unknown Spacetime
1550 hours, TFT
“This just gets weirder and weirder,” Megan Connor said.
“Roger that, Three,” Gregory said. “Not exactly prime real estate, is it?”
“The view is spectacular. But it’s lacking something in the way of amenities, you know?”
Twenty-two hours earlier, they’d come through the TRGA, entering this new and near barren volume of space. The stars were faint, few, and far, a thin scattering across empty night save in one direction, and in that direction 400 billion stars were gathered in a single vast, sweeping spiral of misty light.
The galaxy spanned a full one hundred degrees of sky, intricately delicate, hypnotically beautiful. From here, above the galactic plane, it was possible to see details of the galactic core—a swollen and slightly reddish bulge of ancient stars—and of the surrounding disk, tinted blue-white and shot through with spiraling streamers of inky nebulae. Connor could make out the barred internal structure of the core, the sharp glow of young stars, the sullen embers of old.
The galaxy, she thought, was breathtaking in its beauty, amazing in its intricacy, spectacular in its spiral immensity. You had to be here, some 25,000 light years above the galactic plane, to really appreciate its size and complexity.
Much closer at hand, a solitary world drifted in emptiness.
Connor and Gregory were flying toward the lone planet, their Starblades a few kilometers apart, having launched on patrol from the Concord an hour earlier. After emerging from the TRGA, one of the High Guard cutters had been left behind to protect their way back, while the other two, Pax and Concord, had followed Charlie One in to the planet, seven light-hours—some fifty astronomical units—distant. The two cutters were adrift now, 2 million kilometers from the world, waiting, while the fighters circled on constant patrol.
“So what’s with the name they came up with for that rock?” Gregory asked. “Invictus?”
“It’s Latin,” Connor told him. “It means ‘unconquered.’ ”
“I guess anything sounds better in Latin.”
“The language programs they have working on the Glothr language called it Unconquered, or maybe Unconquerable. I guess they figured Invictus sounds better.”
“Well, better than flashy lights and bioluminescent winking,” Gregory said.
“I’m looking it up,” she told him, pulling up the title on her in-head. There were several references, but William Ernest Henley was at the top of the list. “Huh. There was a poem by that name . . . nineteenth century.”
“I see it,” Gregory replied. “Damn! The first verse is pretty much spot-on, huh?”
She was reading the entry.
Out of the pit that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
There were four verses in all, ending with the one well-known couplet from the piece that she remembered hearing out of context some time before.
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
“I don’t know, Don,” she replied. “Kind of sticky-sweet sentimental, if you ask me.”
“As was most Victorian poetry. The trouble is, my dear Lieutenant, that you have no soul.”
“Fuck you.”
He laughed.
The two High Guard watchships, following the Glothr ship after emerging from the TRGA, had been led across some fifty AUs. Here, they’d encountered this world—dark, icy, and solitary, with no sun of its own. The nearest star was perhaps a light century or so away.
Black as the pit from pole to pole indeed. Connor wondered if the name had been chosen with that poem in mind, and if the choice had been by humans or by an AI running the translation program. Artificial intelligences tended to be aggressively literal in their interpretations of language, but often they could demonstrate depths of insight, emotion, or sheer poetry that humans found surprising.
Invictus was indeed black, a dark and frigid ice ball five times larger than Earth and with a surface temperature of minus 250 degrees Celsius. There was no air, of course. Any planetary atmosphere the body might once have possessed had been frozen out eons ago. Invictus was a rogue, a type of galactic world sometimes called a “Steppenwolf world” . . . though whether that was because it was a lone wolf wandering the steppes, after the novel by Hesse, or because it was a “wild thing” from the classical piece by an old musical group of that name was unclear. Billions of years before, a newborn star system somewhere inside the galaxy had given birth to a number of worlds, but in the jostle and bustle of that system’s formation, gravitational interactions had slingshotted some of those planets into deep space at high speed. It was a drama played out with startling frequency; astronomers currently believed that there were more sunless rogue planets adrift in the galaxy than there were stars within it—a number in the hundreds of billions.
More startling was the discovery that such worlds could hold on to their internal heat for a surprising length of time—and that that heat was enough to create vast subsurface oceans locked away beneath ice caps many kilometers thick. The internal heat generated by their formation and the heat arising from the radioactive decay of elements locked away in their cores could keep those oceans liquid for 5 or 6 billion years—or even longer.
Xenobiologists were quite aware of subglacial life within numerous worlds. Both Europa and Enceladus, gas giant moons in Earth’s own solar system, possessed ice-locked oceans with alien biologies, and other moons were strong candidates for life—Ganymede and Callisto, Titan and Triton, and even frigid and far-off Charon. There were also ongoing projects on two dwarf planets—Ceres and Pluto—looking for radioactively heated water and life deep below their frozen surfaces.
Other star systems, too, had frozen worlds and moons with subglacial oceans—at Alpha Centauri, at 70 Ophiuchi, at Arcturus . . . and a hundred other systems so far visited by Humankind.
In fact, most scientists by now were convinced that ice-locked biomes were the rule rather than the exception, that biospheres evolving on the surfaces of life-friendly worlds were far, far outnumbered by moons and planets harboring life in vast oceans locked away far beneath sheltering crusts of ice.
But Invictus was the first world humans had visited without a life-giving star and where they still had found . . . life.
And technic life at that.
“So . . . lonely,” Connor said, more to herself than to her wingman.
This Steppenwolf world had not only been flung from the star system that had given it birth. It was actually headed out of the galaxy, traveling with a velocity that would ultimately take it out into the thin, cold emptiness between the galaxies.
She shivered. Invictus would eventually freeze in the intergalactic void. It was a very good thing indeed that the intelligent species inhabiting it had developed star travel before that ultimate night set in. The local TRGA was close by, obviously positioned to serve this world and no others . . . itself an intriguing fact.
“That ring system is interesting,” Gregory observed. “It’s artificial.”
Connor agreed. The planet itself was almost coal black at the poles, regions illuminated solely by the glow from the immense sprawl of the galaxy. But encircling the black world’s equator perhaps three planetary radii out, was a broad, flat ring of light—artificial light bright enough to reflect a dim, blue-tinted glimmer from the ice.
“I think I can see space elevators,” Gregory said. “See them?”
“I do. Like very, very fine threads of light.”
Someone else, it seemed, had hit upon the same trick as Humankind, building elevators connecting the world’s surface with synchorbit, thousands of kilometers above. But Earth’s orbital facilities, while growing quickly out from three separate elevator towers, still were nowhere near numerous or massive enough to form an actual artificial ring around the planet. The Glothr, evidently, had been building their orbital structures for a long, long time.
How long, Connor wondered? There was no way to guess . . . but in her own mind she put a figure of tens of thousands of years as a lower limit . . . and hundreds of thousands as an upper one.
That, more than rumors of time control, was as sobering as a slap across the face. If they had to fight these beings, so far . . . so very far from home. . . .
“What gets me,” Gregory said, thoughtful, “is how the Glothr were evolving all along in their subglacial biome and never would have seen all of . . . this. Not until they emerged from their icy shell. It must have been quite a shock, don’t you think?”
“The xenosoph people are still chewing on the fact that they evolved eyesight at all,” Connor replied. “Evolving in absolute darkness, why do they even have eyes?”
“Well . . . they needed eyes to see luminescent displays,” Gregory replied. “And eventually their own light displays became language.”
“And then the stargods came down and freed them from their icy prison.”
“That’s what they’re claiming.”
“Maybe the stargods gave them eyes.”
Gregory laughed. “That’s the problem with religions. You can blame everything on the gods.”
“Well, we can assume that the civilization we’re calling stargods intervened here in some pretty major ways, right? They gave them enough technology—including things like metals smelting—so that they could move out of their dark ocean and into the ice layers above. And maybe later they would have helped the Glothr deal with the cold and vacuum at the surface of their world.”
“And it looks like they’ve developed a solid space-faring civilization since then. I wonder how long that took?”
“That ring took a long time to build, if it went up piece by piece, like synchorbit back home. I’d also be willing to bet a lot of raw material was imported.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just a feeling. We don’t know how rich Invictus’s subocean crust is in metals or in fossil fuels for plastics. But any marine species is going to have major problems if they can’t use fire.”
“Gotcha. You’re right. And . . . I think we can finally safely say that the stargods, whoever they are, are the ones responsible for the TRGAs. Not the Sh’daar.”
“Probably.”
“You’re not convinced?”
“Not a hundred percent.”
It was an old debate, one waged with considerable heat ever since the discovery of the first TRGA two decades before. According to Agletsch records, there were thousands of TRGA cylinders scattered across much of the galaxy, creating a kind of instantaneous transport system across hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of cubic light years. For a long time, the Sh’daar were presumed to have been the builders, if only because it was known that they used them, and America had spotted a number of them at the core of the N’gai Cloud, the home space of the original ur-Sh’daar.
Over the years, however, that identification had become more and more unlikely. That either the Sh’daar or their ur-Sh’daar forebears used the cylinders didn’t mean that they’d built them. More and more, circumstantial evidence acquired over the decades suggested that whoever had constructed those enigmatic artifacts had done so long before the arrival of the Sh’daar, and with a technology light years beyond anything the Sh’daar had revealed in almost sixty years of contact.
Connor wasn’t completely convinced, though. There were other ways, she thought, of explaining the appearance of the cylinders without invoking yet another culture of god-powerful aliens. Perhaps the ur-Sh’daar had been powerful enough to create them almost a billion years ago, but their cultural offspring—the Sh’daar remnant that had failed to achieve Singularity—had lost the technical know-how.
In the long run, though, it didn’t matter. The TRGA had brought the Concord and the Black Demons here, to this volume of space beyond the edge of the galaxy, and it was up to them to make the best of this new alien contact.
Together, the two Starblade fighters skimmed in toward the dark and alien world. The Glothr ship, Charlie One, had vanished hours ago into the geometric complexities of the artificial ring, taking Ambassador Rand and his staff of volunteers with it. Connor’s AI was holding a targeting reticule on the spot, though whatever structure the ship had entered was vanishingly small.
Sweeping past the planet, they bent their vectors around to take them on a long, curving arc back toward the Concord.
“What about the time factor, Don?” she asked her wingman. “Everybody’s talking about it. When the hell are we?”
“Beats me, Meg. The problem may be beyond Concord’s computers. But when America comes through, her AI ought to crack it in pretty short order.”
There’d been endless speculation in the squadron ready room about that. Since TRGA cylinders worked through time as well as space, the question of when they’d emerged here, out beyond the galaxy’s edge, was at least as important as the question of where.
Connor hoped that America would be coming through soon.
It was so damned lonely out here on the empty edge of Forever. . . .
USNS/HGF Concord
Unknown Spacetime
1619 hours, TFT
The question of time—the when of the spacetime where the squadron had emerged, was very much on Dahlquist’s mind as well.
“Launch courier,” Captain Tsang’s voice ordered. And the telemetry playing in Dahlquist’s head showed the HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier robot streaking from Open Sky’s Number 2 launch bay and dwindling toward the twisting, golden haze of the TRGA.
“Courier away,” Tsang’s voice added, as he informed Lewis and Dahlquist of the fact.
Of course, those words had been spoken nearly seven hours ago; it had taken that long for the transmission to crawl all the way across fifty astronomical units, from the TRGA, where Tsang’s Open Sky was standing guard, to the Pax and the Concord, drifting 2 million kilometers off the newfound world of Invictus. By now, the courier drone would have long since threaded its way through the TRGA and transmitted its message to the America waiting on the other side. It was even possible that the rest of the task force was already through the cylinder and joining the Open Sky. The other two High Guard cutters wouldn’t be aware of the fact until seven hours after it had already happened.
Gray, Dahlquist thought, had screwed up again. He should have sent America through with the entire task force, not piddled away the three High Guard ships. Had he done so, the task force would now have a better idea of whether they were still in Earth’s present, or sometime in the remote past. The assumption had been that if the TRGA transported them into the past, it would be to the N’gai Cloud, as had happened with America and her carrier group twenty years ago. From this exquisite vantage point above the galactic plane, there was no sign of the N’gai Cloud. Even though they were currently many thousands of light years away from where the N’gai Cloud had been, it would have taken many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even millions of years before the small, irregular galaxy was completely devoured by the hungry and far larger Milky Way. The Cloud’s absence suggested that they were still located in Earth’s time now . . . even though the shift across twenty-five thousand light years made such distinctions essentially meaningless.
“Captain?” Margolis, Concord’s communications officer, said. “We have a message coming in from Ambassador Rand.”
“Let me hear.”
The face of Lawrence Rand came up in an in-head window. He looked . . . stressed, his eyes wild. “ . . . calling Pax and Concord,” he was saying. “Come in, please!”
“This is Captain Lewis of the Pax,” another voice replied. “Go ahead, Dr. Rand.”
“Code Alpha! Code Alpha!” Rand shouted. And then his voice began to change, the words deepening in pitch and slowing dramatically. “We’ve . . . got . . . a . . . pro . . . blemmmm. . . .”
“We’ve lost the ambassador,” Margolis said. “Lost his frequency.”
Which meant the aliens had just played their time-warp card, cutting Rand off by drastically slowing the frequency of his transmission, possibly . . . or simply by freezing him in time.
And there was a new and bigger problem now. Glothr ships—a dozen of them—were separating from the planetary rings and hurtling toward the two High Guard vessels.
“Concord!” Lewis snapped. “Order the fighters to close with us and boost! We’re going back to the Triggah!”
“Roger that,” Dahlquist replied. He was already scanning the ship’s various displays, looking for an immediate threat. It was possible that sequestering Rand was a prelude to an all-out attack. “Commander Ames? Take us to General Quarters.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.”
“And let’s turn around and get us the hell out of here.”
Concord spun slowly in place, aligning herself with the distant TRGA, then engaged her gravitic drive, accelerating hard at just over 5,000 gravities.
USNA Star Carrier America
Unknown Spacetime
1745 hours, TFT
It had been a damned tight squeeze.
America’s shield cap was fully half the internal diameter of the TRGA cylinder, and there was absolutely no margin for error. The HVK-724 scout-courier drone had emerged at the Beehive cluster end of the thing and transmitted everything the three High Guard vessels had recorded, including—most important—the precise path through twisted spacetime that Charlie One, the fighter squadron, and the cutters had followed in order to reach the other side.
Gray had released a heartfelt sigh of relief, then, when America drifted slowly clear of the mouth of the spinning cylinder, closely surrounded by a swarm of her fighters—VFA-31, the Impactors; and VFA-215, the Black Knights—and just astern of the battleship New York. Ahead, a few thousand kilometers off, the High Guard watchship Open Sky hung motionless in empty space.
“Welcome to Invictus space, Admiral,” the Open Sky’s captain called. “You are now officially a long way from nowhere.”
“I see that, Captain Tsang,” Gray replied. His gaze was drawn immediately to the galaxy hanging in the distance, the closest intricacies of its spiral some twenty-five thousand light years away, and yet appearing close enough to touch. “Your report said there was no planetary system here . . . just the one planet by itself.”
“That is correct, Admiral. Invictus, a Steppenwolf rogue. It may have been flung clear out of our galaxy millions of years ago.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it in person. Anything from the ambassador yet?”
“Not a word, sir. He should have arrived wherever they were taking him . . . oh . . . about five hours ago, at least. It’s all in the drone transmission.”
“I saw it.”
And Gray was concerned about what he’d seen: long-range vids of the black planet with its intricate system of bright glowing rings. The scale alone was daunting. Those rings, so much vaster than the clutter of shipyards and hotels and military bases and manufactories in Earth’s synchorbit, could have comfortably hidden millions upon millions of warships and a population numbering in the hundreds of billions. If this situation went sour, there was no way in hell Task Force One was going to be able to rescue Rand or his people.
Koenig and the Joint Chiefs had been aware of that cold fact when they’d drawn up Gray’s orders. His first responsibility, above everything else, was to get back to Earth with information. Humankind needed to know what they were facing out here.
At the moment, however, there was no indication whatsoever of trouble. As the last of the task force ships slipped clear of the TRGA’s mouth, he gave the orders to form up and commence acceleration. At their maximum boost of ten thousand gravities, with a flip-over at the halfway point for deceleration, they would arrive at Invictus in a little more than eight hours.
“Very well,” Gray announced over the fleet comm network moments after the last ship through the TRGA reported in. “Everyone arrived in one piece? Good. We’ll stick to the plan, no modifications. Destroyers Lambert and Caiden, you’ll join Open Sky and guard the Triggah. That’s our ticket home, so stay on your toes. Everyone else, form up around America and prepare for boost.”
It was tempting to leave a larger force guarding the TRGA, but Gray was interpreting his orders conservatively. This was, to put it bluntly, a show of force, even though Glothr technology probably rendered any question of fleet strength moot, so far as the humans were concerned.
“Astrogation,” he went on, changing channels. “This is Gray. I need that time data.”
“This is Donovan, Admiral. We’re working on it. The AI is crunching the numbers now.”
“Good.”
“We do have the velocity figures in, though.”
“Let’s hear ’em.”
“We’re estimating, of course, based on averages pulled from the local hydrogen background . . . but it looks like Invictus and the TRGA both are moving at about three-point-five million kilometers per hour.”
That was a jolt: 3.5 million kph was fast . . . about a third of 1 percent of the speed of light. Some natural objects were faster—Gray knew of one rogue star clocked at almost 50 million kph. It could happen when a pair of planets—or a planet orbiting a star—encountered a black hole, especially the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. If one partner in the pair vanished down the black hole, the other could be slingshotted out across the galaxy at hypervelocity. He wondered if that was the case here.
As Donovan spoke, a graphic drew itself in Gray’s mind, showing the plane of the galaxy—a hundred thousand light years across—their current position a quarter of that distance above the plane, and a straight line running from the rogue back to near the center of the galactic spiral.
“The planet’s origins appear to lie at the edge of the Galactic Core, at a distance of about forty thousand light years from here.”
Gray ran the math through his in-head processors. Forty thousand light years at an average velocity of 3.5 million kph: Invictus had been ejected from the system of its birth some 12 million years ago.
“They called the planet ‘Invictus?’ ” Gray said. “Sounds more like it ought to be Evict-us.”
“That, sir,” Donovan told him, “was very bad.”
“Thank you.”
“That number is an approximation, sir. It’s tough using hydrogen as a frame of reference.”
Gray knew what Donovan meant. In space, the idea of speed meant nothing save in relation to something else. It might be possible to pull the spectra of the galaxy itself and determine a red-shift velocity, indicating how fast Invictus was traveling outbound—but that would require an average of billions of stars all traveling on their own orbits of the galactic center, all moving more or less independently. Or, the astrogation department could measure the relative velocity of hydrogen gas in the immediate vicinity, through which the Steppenwolf world was moving. This close to the galaxy proper, that gas—an incredibly thin gas measuring only an atom or two per cubic centimeter—would be moving with and around the galaxy, not Invictus, and so provide the necessary frame of reference.
Close enough. Three and a half million kilometers per hour? Invictus was booking.
Gray wondered again about the history of the alien Glothr. If their world had been catapulted out of its home system 12 million years ago, that was enough time for an intelligent species to evolve, certainly . . . but far too short a period for the evolution of life. Earth likely had developed life—single-celled prokaryotes—within 600 to 800 million years of Earth’s formation—as much as 4 billion years ago. For most of that unimaginable gulf of time, Earth’s life had been simple. Eukaryotes—complex cells—had evolved 2 billion years ago, while multicellular life hadn’t gotten started until around 1 billion years ago.
Which meant that when Glothr was kicked out of its home system—back toward the Galactic Core—it had been a living world, complete with its own subglacial ecosystem. The Glothr themselves must have evolved during the long voyage outbound across galactic space, probably after their world had already left the galaxy proper.
So . . . where had the TRGA come from? Not from Invictus’s home system, certainly. It must have been constructed on the fly, as it were, as Invictus zipped out of the galaxy at a blistering 3.5 million kph. Somehow, whoever or whatever had built the TRGA had identified Invictus as a world of interest, a world worth visiting.
Or a world for which they’d decided to provide a high-speed transportation system, a part of the galaxy’s transit network.
“Admiral Gray?” It was Commander Eric Bittner, head of America’s Astrogation Department, and Lieutenant Donovan’s boss. “We’ve got some . . . information for you.”
He sounded hesitant enough that Gray instantly felt a twinge of alarm. “What is it, Commander?”
“We have the preliminary numbers. On the time problem.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sir . . . we had a lot of trouble nailing this one down. We’ve been trying to identify individual pulsars by their transmission fingerprints. But . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“I’m sure you’re aware that any galactic pulsars we can identify out here are essentially anywhere from twenty-five to eighty thousand years in the past,” Gray said.
“Of course, Admiral,” Bittner said sharply. “That’s obvious. No . . . the problem is, we’re in deep time.”
“Eight hundred million years in the past?” Gray asked. So . . . the Glothr had led them back in time to the epoch of the original ur-Sh’daar. . . .
“No sir. We appear to be something like twelve million years in our own future.
“My God . . .”